Okay, yes it’s insane to go on a vaca­tion when one is unem­ployed. But logis­ti­cally, it’s the best time to go: no jug­gling work sched­ules, no fin­ish­ing up projects before you go, no tak­ing cell phone calls from har­ried col­leagues. Julie had saved up the money and started plan­ning a get­away this sum­mer and reser­va­tions were all in place when I sud­denly found myself out of a job. We could have can­celed but Octo­ber brought us more than our share of dis­ap­point­ments and we decided to go for it. Three guesses where we are:

h3. More pho­tos:

See “all the WDW photos”:http://flickr.com/photos/martin_kelley/tags/wdw2006/

In the news front, I’m no longer work­ing at FGC. Rea­sons are com­pli­cated, as is often the case. In eight years I did some good work with some great peo­ple. I’ll be miss­ing the hard-working and faith­ful col­leagues and com­mit­tee mem­bers I got to serve with over the years. I’ll be work­ing on build­ing my “tech career”:www.martinkelley.com and look for­ward to new chal­lenges. Tran­si­tions are always a bit scary, so hold us in your prayers in this time.

There are a bunch of fas­ci­nat­ing rants against the con­tem­po­rary peace move­ment as the result of an arti­cle by Charles M. Brown, an anti-sanctions activist that has somewhat-unfairly chal­lenged his for­mer col­leagues at the Nonviolence.org-affiliated Voices in the Wilder­ness. Brown talks quite frankly about his feel­ings that Sad­dam Hus­sein used the peace group for pro­pa­ganda pur­poses and he chal­lenges many of the cul­tural norms of the peace move­ment. I don’t know if Brown real­ized just how much the anti-peace move­ment crowd would jump at his arti­cle. It’s got­ten play in InstaPun­dit and In Con­text: None So Blind.
Brown’s cri­tique is inter­est­ing but not really fair: he faults Voices for hav­ing a sin­gle focus (sanc­tions) and sin­gle goal (chang­ing U.S. pol­icy) but what else should be expected of a small group with no sig­nif­i­cant bud­get? Over the course of his work against sanc­tions Brown started study­ing Iraqi his­tory as an aca­d­e­mic and he began to worry that Voices dis­re­garded his­tor­i­cal analy­sis that “did not take … Desert Storm as their point of depar­ture.” But was he sur­prised? Of course an aca­d­e­mic is going to have a longer his­tor­i­cal view than an under­funded peace group. The sharp focus of Voices made it a wel­come anom­aly in the peace move­ment and gave it a strength of a clear mes­sage. Yes it was a prophetic voice and yes it was a largely U.S.-centric voice but as I under­stand it, that was much of the point behind its work: We can do bet­ter in the world. It was Amer­i­cans tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for our own people’s blind­ness and dis­re­gard for human life. That Iraq has prob­lems doesn’t let us off the hook of look­ing at our own culture’s skele­tons.
What I do find fas­ci­nat­ing is his behind-the-scenes descrip­tion of the cul­ture of the 1990s peace move­ment. He talks about the roots of the anti-sanctions activism in Catholic-Worker “dra­maturgy.” He’s undoubt­edly right that peace activists didn’t chal­lenge Baathist party pro­pa­ganda enough, that we used the suf­fer­ing of Iraqi peo­ple for our own anti-war pro­pa­ganda, and that our analy­sis was often too sim­plis­tic. That doesn’t change the fact that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Iraqi chil­dren died from sanc­tions that most Amer­i­cans knew lit­tle about.
The peace move­ment doesn’t chal­lenge its own assump­tions enough and I’m glad Brown is shar­ing a self-critique. I wish he were a bit gen­tler and sus­pect he’ll look back at his work with Voices with more char­ity in years to come. Did he know the fod­der his cri­tique would give to the hawk­ish groups? Rather than recant his past as per the neo-conservative play­book, he could had offered his reflec­tions and cri­tique with an acknowl­eg­ment that there are plenty of good moti­va­tions behind the work of many peace activists. I like a lot of what Brown has to say but I won­der if peace activists will be able to hear it now. I think Brown will even­tu­ally find his new hawk­ish friends are at least as caught up in group-think, his­tor­i­cal myopia, and pro­pa­ganda prop­a­ga­tion as the peo­ple he cri­tiques.
Voices in the Wilder­ness has done a lot of good edu­cat­ing Amer­i­cans about the effects of our poli­cies over­seas. It’s been hard and often-thankless work in a cli­mate that didn’t sup­port peace work­ers either morally or finan­cially. The U.S. is a much bet­ter place because of Voices and the peace move­ment was cer­tainly invig­o­rated by its breath of fresh air.